Social Network Woes?
This past week
MySpace announced the purchase of Photobucket for $250 million in cash. Compared to News Corp's $580 million acquisition of MySpace, this looks relatively expensive. Further since
Photobucket users are primarily MySpace users, News Corp is paying a lot for an incremental amount of eyeballs. Why would News Corp do such a thing?
Well, in a case of the rich getting richer, MySpace is the primary destination for social networkers out there. Sure, there's
LinkedIn for business folk,
Friendster for early adopter social networkers,
Sneakerplay for sneaker lovers,
Facebook for college students and so on and so forth. However, nothing beats the shear strength of MySpace's reach and depth (176 million as of right now). MySpace helps to launch many items of interest
including a high proportion of Michael Eisner's Prom Queen episodes, various movies and television shows, and of course the original intent of MySpace: music and unsigned bands. MySpace video is second only to juggernaut
YouTube and the numbers for MySpace are staggering, with the social networking site consistently in the top 5 sites hit, searched for, and session time.
MySpace is protecting its territory and rightfully so. However, those of you who remember Friendster also remember how quickly that social network flickered out. With niche social networks coming out, MySpace wants to be the ONLY destination for social networkers. Two weeks ago, I was notified that my account on Nike's Runner's social network would no longer be supported. I suspect that as time goes on this will be a common scenario. However, the niche social networks do have targeting which many advertisers find valuable. The social network is stronger than ever however, we are slowly seeing segmentation.
I would compare this now to the age of network television versus cable. We have the big players, the MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Facebooks (akin to ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) and then the niche players like SneakerPlay,
MuscleDog,
Barack Obama Supporters, etc which all serve a very important purpose. And if we take this a step further, I could definitely see MySpace purchasing other social networks (like StockPickr for example) similar to NBC and CNBC, simply to sell highly targeted niche advertising.
Labels: barack obama, eisner, facebook, myspace, news corp, nike, prom queen, sneakerplay, social network, stockpickr, trends, youtube
What Are You Doing?
With all of the hype surrounding
Twitter, I just had to write about it. For those of you unaware of Twitter, it is a minute by minute, second by second updater that you can post to via SMS or the web. It's popularity really grew after the
SxSW film festival about a month and a half ago, and its been growing ever since. There have been some Twitter clones out there, like a
Facebook or
Bebo, however Twitter seems to have rapidly become its own verb in a very short amount of time.
The sign that Twitter has made it to the big time is the new
Barack Obama account that is a featured Twitter member. While Barack is the most Web 2.0 ified of presidential candidates (he has his own social network, YouTube, MySpace, etc), something about Twitter is extremely compelling. Unlike Facebook's automatic updates, Twitter allows you to write about something when you WANT to write about it and be able to broadcast this to the world (or your subscribers).
So you're probably thinking "Why would I want to know what you are doing at all times?" From a personal perspective, you probably wouldn't. (You definitely wouldn't.) However, from a brand perspective and perhaps even from an IR perspective (although this is very far from happening), you might be interested in knowing what is going on and a daily updated blog is simply not enough. Diehard Apple fanatics would be able to know Steve Jobs every thought at any time of the day. Fans of 24 would get to know what "Jack Bauer" was thinking every second of his day. And supporters, or potential on-the-fencers would be able to know what Barack Obama's viewpoints were...every second of every day. Sounds almost too good to be true, and it is, but the point that I want to make here is that as more and more tools come out that are being adopted by mainstream (right now it is the blog), consumers will be demanding more and more usage of it, which means allocating more resources to updating your Twitter / blog /MySpace profile / YouTube channel
Labels: barack obama, myspace, SMS, twitter, youtube
